'From this spirit, which "pure wine" they call, The antidote for a heart in ruins they call.

Cups two or three, heavily full, bring ye quickly.

Why good water "bad water" do they call?' *

(104)

'Like the water of a great river, and like a wind in the

desert

Another day from my turn of life has gone.

There are two days for which I will never awake care, The day which has not come, and the day which has gone. (20)

That Omar wrote verses, partly for his own amusement and partly to give way to whatever mood he happened to be in at the time, and how changeable these moods were, is shown by the strange juxtaposition of incongruous verses. Stanza 101 might have been written by the most pious of mystics :

'Council will I give thee, if thou wilt give me ear;
For God's sake, put not on the garments of falsehood.

The issue is for all time, and this world but for a moment. For the sake of a moment sell not the kingdom of eternity.'

(101)

But the stanza preceding this pious utterance ends with the line,

'Drink wine, for into this world thou comest not again ;' and the stanza which follows begins,

'O Khayyam, if with wine thou be drunk, be merry!'

To say that the same pen which wrote stanza 101 could not have written much of the rest of the quatrains, would be like saying that the 'Cottar's Saturday Night' could not have been written by Robert Burns, or that the author of the Hesperides,' who is a pagan of the pagans with scarce a trace of Christianity, and the author of the Noble Numbers,' evidently an orthodox clergyman of the Church of England, could not have been one and the same person.

Frequently, though not often, a verse reminds us of sayings in the Gospels, but, as the Sufis draw largely from the Gospels, these verses have also a Sufi ring.

'Wine' is sharáb; bad water,' shar áb.

'Far beyond the Sphere my thought at first Did seek Tablet and Pen, Heaven and Hell.

At last a teacher of sound opinion said to me: "Tablet and Pen, Heaven and Hell are within thee." (15)

The heavenly Vault is a girdle from our worn-out bodies: Jayhún is a trace from our pellucid tears.

Hell is sparks from our profitless vexation. Heaven is a moment from our tranquil time.'

(33)

'So far as thou canst, turn not fretting upon any man. Upon the fire of thine own wrath make no man sit.

(4)

If everlasting rest thou covet,

Ever fret thyself, and fret none other.'

Not the smallest value of the quatrains of Omar Khayyám is to show how many-sided is the human mind. It is everything by turn and nothing long. It can be compared only to the fabled Ghúl. Hence we are not surprised to find Omar soaring to heights which remind us of Wordsworth's Ode on 'Intimations of Immortality,' or of Avicenna's 'Hymn to the Soul,' if, indeed, Omar is not here inspired by his great forerunner.

'O Heart, from the dust of the body wert thou free, Then wert thou a naked spirit in the skies.

The Throne of God is thy seat; thy shame let it be That thou comest and in this abode of dust dost dwell.'

(145)

In a number of stanzas Omar seems to refer to some misfortune which had overtaken him and reduced him to poverty. Perhaps it was the death of his friend and patron Nizám al-Mulk.

'Khayyam, who the tents of wisdom was stitching,

Into the furnace of affliction fell and in no time was burnt.
The shears of Fate the tent-ropes of his life did cut.
The broker of hope for nothing him did sell.'

(22)

And again, in quatrains 53 and 153 he laments that the only old friend he has left is new wine; whilst in 121 he has come to regard the lectures to which in youth he listened, as well as those which he himself delivered, as mere wind.* It may be that this unhappy ending to his

It is hoped that these and the remaining quatrains not cited above will appear in a volume of the 'Wisdom of the East' Series,

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career is responsible for the veins of pessimism and recklessness which run through so many of the quatrains. Otherwise he seems to have gained the respect and affection of those who knew him. His younger contemporary, Samarkandi, mentions having met him at Balkh in the year 1112 or 1113, on which occasion he predicted that his grave would be in a spot where the trees would shed their blossom on it twice in the year. Being in Nishapor some twenty years later he visited Omar's tomb and found it at the foot of a wall over which pear trees and peach trees hung their branches. He adds: 'Then I remembered that saying which I had heard from him in the city of Balkh, and I fell to weeping, because on the face of the earth and in all the regions of the habitable globe, I nowhere saw one like unto him.'*

T. H. WEIR.

'Chahár Maqála,' translated by E. G. Browne, London, 1921, p. 71.

Art. 6.-WHERE EMPIRE SETTLEMENT FAILS.

It is an increasing faith that a thorough-going resettlement of population within the British Commonwealth of Nations is a condition precedent to the health of the Empire, and especially of Great Britain, its most crowded unit. Fear of over-population, however, in some of our industrial centres is at the moment, and incidentally, promoting a form of migration that has no medicinal virtue whatever, that is, indeed, actively inimical to our well-being. The opportunities for settlement overseas do not diminish. Speed and ease of transport, as well as scientific methods of exploitation, have increased them. At the same time, the stress at home is continually emphasised. The number of young men who never have worked and seem unlikely to find work in this country is larger than it ever has been, and the total figures of unemployment do not diminish. The new and the old should be complementary; but are not. The rich and empty countries fail to compensate for the old and overcrowded country. More than this: a part of the migration that is taking place is wholly regrettable. A number of our skilled men are slowly filtering away; and while they are too few appreciably to reduce the population, they are numerous enough to reduce the national efficiency. One of the inherent difficulties of settlement is, and always will be, that the crowded country wishes to keep its better and to dismiss its worse citizens; while the emptier country tends to reject the worse and to lure the better, or the richer. Yet, after all, if men are not so equal as Rousseau suggested, they are in the bulk tolerably equal in fitness and morality. This overcrowded island of ours has millions who would make good citizens, and beget good citizens wherever they lived. No one suggests dumping undesirables. The men we can ill spare are not the physically and mentally fit, but skilled workers in the trades that earn our national income.

Our export trade has flourished in the past chiefly because the exported stuff has been sterling. Let an example or two suffice. In a recent tour of the Empire I was looking over a condensed-milk factory in the North Island of New Zealand, and was shown an engine that,

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I for a generation, had been used continuously and was still effective. The manager said with conviction: 'We should not dream of getting our machinery from anywhere but Britain.' Again, on a vast Queensland sheep station, at least a hundred miles from a railway, a shearing was in progress. The king of the team was the sorter. He could classify the quality of the wool by a touch and a glance. Give him five seconds for every fleece, and he would grade the thousand and more presented to him into six several qualities and make no mistake. When I asked how he attained to such unerring skill he-working in a lonely spot 12,000 miles from Yorkshire-said that he regarded himself as a baby compared with the experts in Bradford to whom his wool would go. He spoke of them as Kipling wrote of his master, Tennyson. It is acknowledged that we possess in this country, in all sorts of trades, men whose skill is unapproachable, largely because it is inherited. It is irreplaceable. A great many of these men, especially among the engineers, are leaving their ancestral homes, some for the United States, some even for France, but very few for the Dominions. Scarcely any single trade is exempt from this drain; and the smaller works have suffered as well as the bigger.

There is a glass and clock-making factory in Essex, where the plant increased during the war, and much new skill was acquired. Incidentally, it was claimed by the proprietor that no workers excel the inhabitants of the London suburbs in trustworthiness and the progressive acquirement of technical skill. When the war was over, and the factitious prosperity of the next year or two had waned, a crisis arrived. Taxation at home and inflated currencies abroad prevented the application of necessary capital for the mass production of clocks and for the maintenance of skilled workers in optical glass. The experts began to fail in touch and skill merely from want of practice; and a number of them, unable to endure this progressive diminution of capacity, were forced into emigration.* It is not possible to collect figures of loss

* Since this was written a remarkable letter on the emigration of skilled workers in optical glass has appeared in 'The Times,' from Chance Brothers, who did much in the war to recover British superiority in this branch of scientific work.